out our position. Further public differences confirmed this. In June I spoke to the Welsh Party Conference in Aberystwyth expressing strong reservations about statutory wage controls: the same day Reggie Maudling spoke in Chislehurst implying that we might support a statutory policy. A few days later Keith made a speech casting severe doubt on the value of even a wage freeze, suggesting that it would be used as an excuse for not cutting public spending and taking the other necessary economic steps. On the same day Peter Walker called for a statutory pay policy — and was himself rebutted by Keith, who said bluntly that wage freezes did not work. Not surprisingly, Conservative splits figured large in the press. The fact that these divisions were more than replicated on the Government side was of only limited comfort.
I decided that even if we could not as yet all agree an analysis, we must at least agree to stick to a form of words that would paper over the cracks. After we had heard Denis Healey’s 1 July statement foreshadowing Labour’s introduction of an incomes policy based on sanctions against employers rather than unions, Shadow Cabinet met to discuss our reaction. The crucial question was whether, when it came to a vote in the House, we should support the Government, abstain or vote against. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Chancellor had only given a preliminary indication of what he intended. We would have to wait for the promised White Paper before we even knew whether the policy could properly be described as voluntary or statutory. On the other hand, we did not want to be in the position of flatly refusing support for measures to bring down inflation, even if they included a statutory policy.
Now the Chief Whip told us that there were at least thirty Tory MPs who were opposed in principle to statutory controls and would expect us to oppose them too. I summed up as best I could. Our public line at this stage must be that although the Party would always support measures it believed to be in the national interest, the Chancellor’s statement was high on intentions and low on details. Moreover, he had said nothing about public expenditure cuts or about dropping policies for further nationalization, both of which were directly relevant to the control of inflation.
I found from my own soundings that Conservative opinion in the country was strongly opposed to employers having to bear the brunt of anti-inflation measures. Our supporters wanted us to be tough on Labour. The following day the Backbench Finance Committee met and Bill Shelton reported to me their concerns. While very few wanted us to vote against the Government’s package outright, there was widespread anxiety lest by supporting it we would also be endorsing a continuation of the socialist programme.
At Shadow Cabinet on Monday 7 July, Jim Prior and Keith Joseph argued their conflicting cases. But the crucial question was still which Division Lobby the Party should enter, if any. By now the safest, if least glorious, course appeared to be to abstain. The risk was that such a tactic would dismay both wings of the Parliamentary Party and we could find ourselves with a three-way split.
Whatever the tactics to employ, I also needed to be clear in my own mind whether the Healey measures were a genuine step towards financial discipline or a smokescreen. So the day after the Shadow Cabinet discussion I had a working supper in my room in the House with Willie, Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and a number of economists and City experts, including people like Alan Walters, Brian Griffiths, Gordon Pepper and Sam Brittan who were in regular touch with me and on whose opinions I set a high value.[37] Although we would have to look at the package as a whole, especially the monetary and fiscal side, as Geoffrey said at the start of the evening, I came away feeling still less inclined to lend support to flimsy and possibly harmful proposals.
The White Paper, containing the details, was published on Friday 11 July. It was, as expected, a curate’s egg, containing measures like cash limits which we approved but not matching these with any real public expenditure cuts. The centrepiece was a ?6 limit on pay increases for the coming year. The most astonishing omission was that the Government refused to publish the draft Bill it claimed to have drawn up which would introduce statutory controls if the voluntary limits were ignored. By the time it came to a vote, backbench and Shadow Cabinet opinion favoured abstention and this was now agreed. My own speech in the debate did not go particularly well — unsurprisingly, given the protean case I had to present. That might have been awkward, but Ted bailed me out by regretting that we were not supporting the Government and then refusing to back our critical amendment.
If one good thing came out of these travails, it was that the Shadow Cabinet was pushed towards an agreed line on incomes policy. This was that the conquest of inflation required that all economic policies must be pulling in the same anti-inflationary direction, in particular public spending and monetary policy. An incomes policy might play a useful part as one of a comprehensive package of policies, but was not to be considered as an alternative to the others, and could not be expected to achieve much on its own. While hardly qualifying as an original (or even true) economic insight, this at least provided a temporary refuge.
In any case, the Government’s July package was rightly judged to be insufficient to deal with the looming economic crisis. Inflation that summer reached an all-time high of 26.9 per cent.
We fled to Brittany in August for a holiday canal-cruising. For my holiday reading I took a book on British Prime Ministers. I was still away when Harold Wilson launched the incomes policy in a television broadcast asking people to give ‘a year for Britain’ by sticking to the ?6 limit. In my absence, Willie Whitelaw replied the following evening giving this nonsense a rather warmer welcome than I could have been persuaded to do.
PROBLEMS OF OPPOSITION
In spite of the difficulties I had faced in the months since I became Leader, I approached that autumn’s Party Conference in reasonably good spirits. Ted and his friends seemed likely to continue being as difficult as possible, but my foreign visits had boosted my own standing.[38] The Government’s economic policy was in ruins. The Conservatives were 23 per cent ahead of Labour, according to a pre-Conference opinion poll. The task at Blackpool was to consolidate all this by showing that I could command the support of the Party in the country.
The Leader’s speech at a Party Conference is quite unlike the Conference speeches of other front-bench spokesmen. It has to cover a sufficiently wide number of subjects to avoid the criticism that one has ‘left out’ some burning issue. Yet each section of the speech has to have a thematic correspondence with all the other sections. Otherwise, you finish up with what I used to call a ‘Christmas tree’, on which pledges and achievements are hung and where each new topic is classically announced by the mind-numbing phrase ‘I now turn to…’. A powerful speech of the sort required to inspire the Party faithful, as well as easing the worries of the doubters, is in some ways more like a piece of poetry than prose. Not that one should be tempted to use flowery language, but rather that it is the ideas, sentiments and mood below the surface which count. Material which could easily form a clear and persuasive article may be altogether inappropriate for a speech. And although one has to scrutinize a text to ensure the removal of dangerous ambiguities, an effective speech may afterwards read almost lamely in cold print. I was to learn all these things over the next few years. But I had barely begun to grasp them when I started work on my first Leader’s Conference speech in 1975.
I told my speech-writers that I was not going to make just an economic speech. The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation. But when I discussed the kind of draft I wanted with Chris Patten and others from the Research Department, I felt they were just not getting the message I wanted to despatch. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it flowed and flowed. But was it a speech? I was reading it all through and redrafting on Sunday morning when Woodrow Wyatt — a former Labour MP turned entrepreneur, author, sympathizer and close friend — telephoned. I told him what I was doing and he suggested I come round to his house for supper so that he could look at it. The experienced journalist’s eye saw all that I had not. So the two of us began to cut and shape and reorganize. By the time I arrived in Blackpool I had the beginnings of a Conference speech. I also found that Chris Patten and others had written new material. We married the two and a first draft was accordingly produced.
It was Ted who had overturned the convention that the Party Leader only turned up at the end of the Conference, descending from on high to deliver his speech to an adoring, servile throng. I took this a stage further. As well as arriving early, I also, particularly on this first occasion, used every opportunity to meet the constituency representatives, whose loyalty I knew I would have to earn. In fact, I carried this to what the Conference
